Read the article, and then if you don’t already, read Techmeme regularly!

How to harness Techmeme for your own tech rock stardom

And now, the part you’re really interested in: how to get some of that Techmeme Googlejuice and readership for yourself.

The trick is a simple one: it’s to get Techmeme to mention your blog articles in the “Discussion” section for its stories, or better still, make one of your articles a featured article. Once that happens a couple of times, you’ll notice that your readership will grow from the “Techmeme bump” and if you play your cards right, all sorts of opportunities will follow. It’s worked for me at Global Nerdy, which often gets listed in “Discussion” lists for Techmeme articles and has had a few articles as feature articles, and it’s grown from zero readers in 2006 to over 8.7 million pageviews to date.

Link to and mention all the people who have said something intelligent.

Repeat for 30 days.

Go to a couple of conferences a month.

That’s all there is to it: find featured articles in Techmeme, write something intelligent about it in your blog (don’t forget to link to the article!) and keep doing it. Like a lot of other things in tech, as long as you’ve got the threshold amount of smarts, it’s all about perseverance.

Are you looking for your next great hire?

I’m looking for my next great job! If you’re looking for someone with desktop, web, mobile, and IoT development skills who can also communicate to technical and non-technical audiences, or a marketer or evangelist who also has a technology background and can code, you should talk to me.

I joined Uber because of its Mission, and the challenge to build global capabilities that would help the company mature and thrive long-term.

It is now clear, however, that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business.

There are thousands of amazing people at the company, and I truly wish everyone well.

Jones had been with Uber a mere six months. His prior job was at Target, where Recode reports he was “its well-regarded CMO”, and in addition to being the president of its main ride-sharing business, his was the responsibility “to remake the company’s tainted image”. In order to get lured away from such a position at Target, Jones was probably offered a salary of considerable size and stock options of even greater potential value. Walking away from them — especially well before those options would’ve vested — wouldn’t have been a decision that he would take lightly. There’s also the fact that you can tolerate a lot when you’re one of the top dogs at a place that’s been valued as high as $70 billion.

If you’ve been on the internet over the past five or so years, you’ve likely heard the maxim that people don’t quit their jobs; they quit their bosses. This generally traces back to a 2008 article written by Jennifer Robison in Gallup’s Business Journal titled Turning Around Employee Turnover, whose conclusions are based on “Gallup research, which included a meta-analysis of 44 organizations and 10,609 business units, Gallup Polls of the U.S. working population, exit interviews conducted on behalf of several companies, and Gallup’s selection research database”.

“Most people quit for a few explainable reasons,” Robison wrote, and “at least 75% of the reasons for voluntary turnover can be influenced by managers.”

She also observes that after a certain point, no amount of money will make up for a bad manager. I understand this completely — I once took a 25% pay cut by changing jobs to get away from a management team that was slowly turning the workplace into something like Italy around the time of the Borgias.

And once again, because it’s worth viewing if you haven’t seen this video yet:

Are you looking for your next great hire?

I’m looking for my next great job! If you’re looking for someone with desktop, web, mobile, and IoT development skills who can also communicate to technical and non-technical audiences, or a marketer or evangelist who also has a technology background and can code, you should talk to me.

What’s Tampa iOS Meetup all about?

As I mentioned earlier, Tampa iOS Meetup is the Tampa Bay area’s meetup for beginning programmers and developers new to iOS development. Each meetup has two parts:

The presentation, where we’ll cover the concepts you’ll need to write the app of the day, followed by

The workshop, where we’ll actually code the app together.

The meetup works best if you bring a Mac laptop with the current version of Xcode (the tool we’ll use to develop iOS apps) installed. If you don’t have one, don’t worry; you don’t need one for the presentation part, and we can form teams for the workshop.

We use the presentation-followed-by-workshop approach because it’s our answer to a question that I’ve been asked again and again, and it goes something like this:

“I’ve been studying iOS development for some time, and I’m still having a problem writing apps. I know how to program specific features in iOS, but I don’t know how to turn a bunch of features into an app.”

It’s one thing to go through tutorials that show you how to program a specific feature. It’s a completely different thing to take the knowledge from those tutorials and then write an app. My goal for Tampa iOS Meetup in 2017 is to show you how to make that leap by walking you through the process of making apps.

Special thanks to our sponsor

Tampa iOS Meetup wouldn’t be possible without the generosity of Wolters Kluwer. They provide both the space in which to hold the meetup, as well as the food and drinks! Special thanks to John Wang, my go-to guy at Wolters Kluwer, and source of valuable feedback for my presentations.

Craig Clayton is one of the heroes in the Tampa tech scene. He organized and ran the Suncoast iOS Meetup here in Tampa as well as intensive iOS coding academies, and he makes a living writing mobile apps. If you’re a Patriots fan with an iPhone, chances are you’ve used his app. He’s been quite busy for the past little while, and if you’re interested in iOS development, you might be interested in what he’s up to…

On Saturday, April 1, Craig will be leading Swift 101: Getting Started, a full-day live online class where he’ll guide you through the process of building a Square Case-like iOS app, using iOS features such as Contacts, SiriKit, and TouchID. By the end of the session, you’ll have a better understanding of how to create apps for the latest version of iOS.

You won’t have to go anywhere to attend — it’ll be an online class taking place on Saturday, April 1, 2017, from 10:00 a.m. through 5:00 p.m.. The course will cost US$50 to attend, plus a US$2 credit card processing fee. There’s a limited number of slots for the course, so reserve yours now!

If you’d like to get a better idea of what the course would be like — or if you’d like to supplement your iOS development studies — check out Craig’s book, iOS 10 Programming for Beginners. Like the upcoming online course, it’s aimed at beginners, but it’s full of material useful even to experienced iOS developers.

Most of the book, is devoted to building a single application: Let’s Eat, a restaurant review app that becomes more sophisticated and gains more features with each chapter. Each chapter begins with an explanation of the topics that will be covered, and features both clear explanations of those topics, along with step-by-step instructions for turning those topics into working code. Craig does an excellent job of explaining what he did with his code and why he did it. As you work on Let’s Eat, you’ll have built a professional-looking app that uses a number of iOS features, including GPS and maps, the camera, iPad multitasking, iMessage, and even 3D touch. When you’re done, you should be able to take the knowledge from working on the app and apply it to your own projects.

If you’re interested in the process behind the creation of Craig’s book, read his article, Using Kaizen to Improve as a Developer, in which he writes about adopting kaizen, the Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement at all levels of an organization, in all areas.

Once, when asked the dreaded “Where do you see yourself in five years?” question in a job interview, I answered “Standing on a mountain of my defeated enemies.” Now, the interviewer and I knew each other enough for this joke to work, but that was just fortunate circumstance. Should you find yourself in the same situation, here are some articles on answers to the “five years” question:

“Many of our employees are young and put in 14-hour days. Are you up for that kind of challenge?”

“Congratulations on returning to the workforce. Given your family, will you need a flexible schedule?”

“When did you graduate from college?”

“Where are you from?”

“How can our company get better at recruiting people of color?”

“Can you tell me about your disability and how it has shaped you?”

“Have you worked with women bosses in the past, sir?”

“Our employees must look and carry themselves in a certain way. Would you be able to arrange your financial circumstances to rise to the occasion?”

Don Georgevich of JobInterviewTools.com has a set of useful videos on answering job interview questions, such as this one on top 10 interview questions, including “tell me about yourself”, “why should we hire you?”, “what are your strengths and weaknesses?”, “why did you leave your last job?”, and more:

Here’s a Georgevich video that focuses on “tell me about yourself”:

And here’s one about “behavioral” or “identity” questions, which are questions that try to determine your traits, motivations, likes, and dislikes:

Are you looking for your next great hire?

I’m looking for my next great job! If you’re looking for someone with desktop, web, mobile, and IoT development skills who can also communicate to technical and non-technical audiences, or a marketer or evangelist who also has a technology background and can code, you should talk to me.

Tuesday, March 14

An Alexa Skill is a voice interaction capability for Amazon’s Alexa voice service, which runs on various Amazon devices including the Echo, Echo Dot, Tap, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet, as well as some non-Amazon devices such as the Triby Bluetooth speaker. They’re similar to voice commands to the computer on Star Trek: there are Alexa Skills to tell you what the local weather is, play music, set an alarm or timer, answer health questions with the help of WebMD, plan vacations with the assistance of Kayak, order pizza, check stock prices or your bank balance, and more.

In this first meetup, they’ll do a step-by-step walkthrough that will show you how to create a simple Alexa skill. While knowing how to code will be helpful, coding skills aren’t absolutely necessary. Bring a laptop, and make sure you have an AWS account and an account for the Amazon developer portal. An Alexa device isn’t required — you can test Alexa skills via the developer portal, and there’s an iOS/Mac OS app that lets you use Alexa without an Alexa device.

Ybor Tech’sOpenHack is your monthly opportunity to get together with local techies at New World Brewery and socialize over craft beer (you buy) and pizza (they provide) at Ybor City’s most laid-back bar!

Thursday, March 16

Lean Beer is the evening version of Lean Coffee, where people gather to discuss Lean and Agile practices over their adult beverage of choice. Participants propose discussion topics, discussions are timeboxed agile-style, and the conversation and company are always informative and lively.